Obama’s Bipartisanship Lost In Nancy Pelosi’s Office; Now President Tries Senate GOP For Help with Recovery Bill

Yesterday, the House of Representative voted on the president’s economic stimulus bill.

Many new outlets seemed overjoyed that the bill passed.

The real news is this: Republicans totally rejected the bill. Not one Republican voted for it.
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“We can’t continue as a government to spend money we don’t have and pass the bills to our kids and grandkids,” House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, told me last week. “And by and large, most Republicans here in Washington believe that. What we have to do is show the American people through what I call better ideas about how government can do what we need it to do, but do it better and more efficiently.”

Now President Obama is already trying to gain Republican support, in the U.S. Senate.

To me, bipartisanship is working together to make bills than both sides can agree with. When one party makes a bill and includes only their own pet projects, bipartisanship is lost…no matter how many bipartisan cocktail parties follow….

Nancy Pelosy in recovery. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus legislation is headed for the Senate after a surprisingly partisan vote in the House in which Republicans united in opposition and 11 mostly conservative Democrats defected.

Obama hailed his recovery plan, saying it would “save or create more than three million new jobs over the next few years.”

During Senate debate next week, the measure is expected to pick up at least some GOP support. But Obama’s hopes of changing Washington’s partisan culture went unmet despite the popular president’s separate high-profile meetings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday with House and Senate Republicans.

The $819 billion measure has attracted criticism from Republicans and, privately, from some Democrats for spending billions of dollars on Democratic favorites like education despite questions as to whether they would really put people to work.

But with unemployment at its highest level in a quarter-century, the banking industry wobbling despite the infusion of staggering sums of bailout money and states struggling with budget crises, Democrats said the legislation was desperately needed.